Voyage Out: The Complete Series

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

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LUCIA:

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IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, Charley and I were related to or acquainted with almost everybody else in New York. Some considered it a privilege that we had been introduced to, or could greet by first name, everybody worth knowing in New York. Charley (not amongst those who placed pedigree above character) was usually of the opinion that we knew at least everybody by reputation and that that was the way it ought to stay for everybody’s peace and sanity.

It was no surprise then that scores of friends, relations, acquaintances and suitors descended upon my house and, most notably, called on Aunt Merry at Montrose (for Charley herself could never be found in the Park Avenue residence) when news got out about Charlotte Masterson being back in New York, and the invitation to a friend’s wedding and Grand Tour which would take her away again. These callers received fairly dull news of my preparations for the trip but got no satisfaction from Aunt Merry, who could only impart details of the planned itinerary for she knew virtually nothing of Charley’s daily whereabouts. Charley was not at home, not at the Colony Club, not at the Cosmopolitan Club, not out on a drive in an open-topped motor-car with a personable young man in a three piece suit and plain patent leather Oxfords (it was sometimes difficult to distinguish a respectable gentleman from a well-to-do gangster or bootlegger from his state of dress but Aunt Merry was led to believe that the latter favored white spats and two tone shoes), not tripping out for a night on the town with yet another suspect personable young man beginning at Hotel Pennsylvania’s Café Rouge or the Ziegfeld Theater where Jerome Kern’s Show Boat was still playing, not sneaking out on a midnight jaunt to the Cotton Club or some other supper club oozing louche sophistication or one of those gin mills or juice joint venues in Greenwich Village offering hot jazz and giggle water and whoopee, not on a roof garden party with gambling and cocktails and hard liquor and cigars and the ever-present risk of police raids. Charley most certainly was not dancing at the governor’s ball at the Astor, or swanning around a charity fundraiser gala at the Plaza, or dining to a Vincent Lopez orchestra underneath the blue frescoes of the cool and spacious St. Regis Roof Garden (challenging the monopoly of the Ritz-Carlton Roof at dinnertime), flecked with white apple-blossoms and disdainful Japanese roosters and pale blue macaws, or trotting about the newly transformed Central Park Casino and chasing wealthy, pedigreed husbands like the regular well-brought up young ladies of New York, they of the younger Four Hundred. There simply were no reported sightings of Charley in the three days before our transatlantic crossing. Aunt Merry knew even less about what Charley was up to during that time. Charley’s brief appearances and the little notes that she left on the sideboard, diligently and early every day, when she disappeared from dawn to dark to nobody-knew-where were as cryptic and mysterious as her daily activities. The callers certainly received no satisfaction from Charley herself, although that had been the case for a great many long months. Fewer strains of scandalizing conjecture arose from this circumstance than might normally have been attached to someone less irreproachable in respectability and fortune, less indifferent to societal opinion, and less carelessly unconventional in her habits than Charley.

Charley had been called the hellion of the Mastersons (or Elyots, depending on whose side of the family tree was being blamed) for as long and as often as she had been referred to as the Montrose heiress. Her youthful complexion and easy, winning smiles masked a stout heart. One could, it was said, count on Charley to charge in where angels feared to tread. Her outrageous scrapes had been commonly ascribed to recklessness, foolhardiness and excitable temper; they made the New York matrons hiss in indignation but were quickly waved aside as the antics of a headstrong young jackanapes, an incorrigible scapegrace, in favor of much tastier gossip fare, the true sizzlingly juicy adult scandals. Knowledge of the grandeur of the Masterson fortune had always seemed to help ease the path from opprobrium to clemency, tolerance, indulgence, forgiveness, exoneration, whatever the case may be. Whilst there were the occasional mutterings that a girl with a strong will like Charley’s would come to a bad end, nobody dared to tell Charley that her will must be bent to the wishes of those who knew better what was good for her. It was far more likely to hear the appellations of “hoyden”, “ungovernable”, “wild”, “tatterdemalion”, “menace” mentioned in the same exasperated breath as Charley’s name than, say, the harsher sneering dismissals of “easy virtue” or “damaged goods” or “emulating the porous morals of those loose young women of the flapper generation”. Charley was forced to endure no public pillorying by unceasing gossip and whispering and smug disdain, no sentencing to permanent social ostracism and exile, no scarlet letter to be worn on her breast as a mark of indelible shame, no excision of her name from the family bible, no eternal damnation of her future. Such was the luck of being Charley Masterson that while these perils hovered over each and every one of us and kept Old New York society in check (or at least encouraged the transgressors to avoid being caught at all costs), Charley carried on blithely oblivious to the razor-edged murmurings, defying those who would whittle her down to fit the mold fashioned by another, simply not caring about the repercussions, a heretical declaration to anyone who chose to pay attention that she worshiped a different god.

But what was the Grand Tour to Charley? An unwelcome, irksome insect that had flown into the room, buzzing about, distracting her from her secret capers? There could not have been a more palatable excuse or elegant manner of prevarication and procrastination, for one in search of such things, than to sail off on a luxury ocean liner to foreign shores on the pretext of an extended vacation on the Continent and exotic Egypt, encouraged—fairly pushed—by eager family and envious friends. Was it enough of an inducement to make Charley drop everything and show up at the pier? Her Aunt Merry had issued the closest thing to a summons, and Charley, who loved her aunt and was always particular about attending her aunt as much as she could, was almost guaranteed to comply, but...

The day of departure came swiftly upon us.

To my relief—although I really should not have expected otherwise—I spotted a head bobbing jauntily above the shoulders of the crowds arriving at the pink granite façades of the Chelsea Piers. I had to look twice and really concentrate before I could be certain my eyes had not deceived me.

“Hello, Lucia. Fancy meeting you here.”

A young woman, crowned from head to toe in the carefree dash and ennui of flapper style as if she had stepped out from the very pages of the latest fashion magazines, perhaps even more daring and alluring in sophistication, came before me. She could have been a stranger but for her eyes, warm and twinkling with familiar mischief.

“Charley? You’re not a ghost? There have been all sorts of rumors.” Aunt Merry for one had hinted at a waif, pallid and drawn, thankfully home at last, if briefly, to be stuffed to the brimming with Mrs. Stone’s cooking.

“Interesting ones, I hope?”

“I suppose I ought to know better than to ask where you’ve been and what you have been up to?”

Charley’s lips were atremble with laughter. “Well, if I had been getting mixed up with the dreadful militant suffragists or breaking Prohibition at the Puncheon Club or making whoopee in a torrid love affair, I would hardly tell, would I?” She said this in a voice conspiratorial enough so as not to alarm Aunt Merry or provoke the interrogation of other people gathering in a crowd about us.

We had a large party of friends and family (represented by my mother and Aunt Merry) present to ensure the ceremony of beginning our Grand Tour maiden voyage was carried off with a suitable hullabaloo.

“Don’t disappoint your friends or your family. Bring back an English lord or French baron or Italian prince,” ordered Celeste. The other girls nodded in concurrence and giggled. “Or just run off with one and let us read about it in the papers.”

Our friends had made an expedition of coming out to give us a good send-off which in no way required the handing out of sound, responsible advice.

“To the virgins, to make much of time,” said Frankie in an undertone with her usual quicksilver wit.

Charley’s suitors scowled. A delegation of them had come along, too, led by Richmond Carnoys, Wyatt Amherst and Radley Payne Baylies, to West Manhattan, having been as unsuccessful at catching Charley at home at Montrose in the days before departure as everybody else. Deprived so long of Charley’s company, bearing the indignity of finding out about their lodestar’s return to New York by rumor, and now losing her again (there had been no shortage of gawking at this exquisite new flapper incarnation), possibly forever this time, to reprobate European aristocrats and crumbling ruins, they trailed forlornly behind her, alternately jostling each other and making gallant attempts at joviality.

Charley sailed through the farewells and well-wishers with brisk, sunny brightness, as debonair and airy as you please. (One could almost hear an audible collective sigh from her admirers.) But there were small flickers of something not right. I was aware of a simmering energy in Charley, waiting, impatient for release. An adventure, she had said. I wondered what lay in wait at the end of our voyage. Charley seemed...restless...trepidatious? At times, when I glanced at her, I thought I caught an expression, gone in an instant, a flash of—something. It was hard to define with certainty. She looked, in some moments, hunted.